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COLOMBIA, The Warmth Of A Smile

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An overland journey through Bogotá, Medellín and Cartagena sets out to prove the postcard version of Colombia is closer to the truth than the headlines.

The documentary “COLOMBIA, The Other Side,” released under the alternate title “COLOMBIA, The Warmth Of A Smile,” skips the plane tickets entirely. Instead, the crew drives the whole route — Andes passes, coastal highways and all — to show what daily life actually looks like in a country most foreign coverage still reduces to cartels and conflict. It’s a road trip built around one question: what do we actually know about Colombia beyond the news cycle?

• The route runs overland from Bogotá south across the Andes to Popayán, then north through Cali, Medellín and Cartagena, ending in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
• The film centers on the Tayrona ruins of Ciudad Perdida (“Lost City”) and encounters with Amerindian communities living in the Sierra Nevada.
• The peace agreement signed with the FARC in 2016 ended a five-decade armed conflict, a turning point the film treats as the backdrop for the country it’s now documenting.

The Road, Not the Runway

Choosing highways over flights is the whole point of the production. Cutting from Bogotá down into Popayán and then swinging back north through Cali and Medellín before finishing on the Caribbean coast at Cartagena means the crew passes through the small towns and rural stretches that a flight itinerary would erase entirely. That’s the same overland instinct behind a piece like the KL-to-George Town road trip through Malaysia — the miles between destinations end up mattering as much as the destinations themselves.

Beyond the Headlines

Colombia sits wedged between South and Central America, bordered by Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Panama, and for decades its international image has been dominated by poverty, drug trafficking and militia violence. The film doesn’t deny that history existed — the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, ending a 50-year armed conflict, is treated as the hinge point the country pivoted on. What the documentary pushes back on is the idea that those headlines are the whole story. It’s a countering-the-narrative approach not unlike what’s driven films profiling a day as a tourist in Somalia or the lived reality inside North Korea — places where the news footage and the street-level footage rarely match.

Cities Reinvented

Medellín gets the sharpest turnaround treatment. Once labeled the most dangerous city on the planet, it’s now nicknamed the “city of eternal spring” for its climate, with parks, libraries and public spaces built into a genuinely modern urban core. Cartagena de Indias, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Caribbean coast, offers the opposite texture — colonial walls, narrow alleys and colorful balconies that put its 16th-century Spanish port history on full display. Bogotá’s La Candelaria district, with its colonial architecture and cobbled streets, rounds out the urban leg of the trip before the film heads for open country.

Medellín, once labeled the most dangerous city in the world, now goes by a different name entirely: the city of eternal spring.

The Sierra Nevada and the Lost City

The back half of the journey leaves the cities behind for the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the film documents encounters with native Amerindian communities and treks toward Ciudad Perdida — the Tayrona “Lost City” ruins buried in the mountain jungle. This is where the documentary’s overland premise pays off most directly: reaching the site isn’t a flyover shot, it’s the same slow approach the local communities have always used.

Colombia’s food and landscape get their due too — bandeja paisa, arepas and ceviche show up alongside the shift from Andean coffee country to Caribbean coastline within a single road trip. It’s the kind of range that a lot of travel films covering Latin America try to capture in miniature, but few manage across an entire country in one continuous drive.